Name: Top Troubleshooting Tips for Report Cards in Blackbaud Student Information System™
Uploaded: 2025-11-13T19:00:55.283Z
Duration: 31 min 36 s
Description: Top Troubleshooting Tips for Report Cards in Blackbaud Student Information System™

Transcript for "Top Troubleshooting Tips for Report Cards in Blackbaud Student Information System™": Alrighty. I see that our numbers look to be climbing here. Wanna thank you all for carving out some time to join us. I know that the end of the year can be very busy. With the end of the year comes the theme of report cards and grading. So we definitely wanted to discuss some of the top tips for troubleshooting. My name is Carlton Cohen. I am one of the k 12 customer success managers here, and my role is really just to kick things off. I see some folks that I recognize in the chat out there. Feel free to go ahead and post in the chat. Let us know where you're from, what organization you're associated with, what your role might be. Your comments in the chat are welcome. And in a few slides, I'm sure you'll be reminded about it. But once we reach a point where you have actual questions, the ask is that you make use of the q and a feature for your questions. Comments will come in the chat. Hopefully, that's not too confusing there. I am going to get out of the way in just a minute here. I want to introduce my colleague, Sarah Richards, who is one of our functional experts for k 12. So I will let her take over the show. Awesome. Thanks so much, Carlton. Hi, everybody. So like Carlton said, my name is Sarah, and I'm gonna be here talking to you about, tips for troubleshooting report cards. I have been with Blackbaud for, just over twelve years in the k twelve. So we're gonna jump in just a couple of housekeeping items that we're gonna go over first. So first, if you're having any trouble with audio, it is gonna be broadcast through your computer speakers. So just make sure that those are connected and that you have your volume up. If you're having any technical issues with the video or with volume, go ahead and refresh your browser. That usually takes care of any issues. You are gonna get a link to this webinar. It is recorded, so you'll get that by email with whatever email you registered for this webinar with. We will have the slides available. Actually, they should already be available in the docs section, and so there's some other resources there. So make sure to check out that docs tab before you leave today. You're welcome to chat through the chat channel, but any questions that you have that, you'd like us to answer, please make sure you put those into the q and a. That's where all questions are gonna be answered from today. And you can adjust any settings as needed. You should have a cogwheel, below just to be able to adjust any settings. So we're gonna go ahead, and jump in. We're gonna be talking first about why this matters now. So why are we doing it at this time of year? We're gonna go over some top tips for troubleshooting. We're gonna talk a little bit about some available help resources. And then at the end, we're gonna jump into a q and a. So again, make sure you use that q and a section for questions. So we're here today. We're gonna be focusing on report cards because a lot of schools are gonna be preparing for their end of term reporting, and it's always a good idea to address these issues before you go live with report cards. So we'd like to get everything settled, set up, make sure everything's up to date and ready for when you're ready to get those grades in and publish your report cards. We're gonna make sure that data is accurate before your grades are actually published. We don't wanna cause any confusion for students or parents, especially when they log in to try to access and view those grades. And we want to make sure that you get as few calls as possible during peak reporting time. So making sure that people are calling you, asking you when grades are coming, where they can be viewed. So making sure that everything is ready to go. So some of the top troubleshooting that we get this time of year, one of the first issues is needing to make changes to your grading setup. So for starters, this is gonna be done through the academic persona, be done by a grading manager, and they would go to grades and then the grading setup. Once there, you should be landing on the school year setup. So this is kind of where everything comes together that you have built out in the system. So we're talking your grade translations, your categories, your grade plans. So these are where you're gonna come in, to go to your grade plan groups. You're gonna click view to the far right of the appropriate grade plan, and then adjust the grade plan as needed to accommodate any new setup. So if you are changing the name of a grade, adding grades, adding comments in, this is where you're gonna wanna do that. That's what's gonna make those available to your teachers when it's time to enter grades in. Maybe this year you have added assessments to your grading. How do we get those onto report cards? So this is important to verify the course grade plan. And again, this one's gonna be done through the academics persona. You're gonna go to scheduling and request and schedules, and then you're gonna locate that course. If you click on the course name, this will bring you into edit mode. There's gonna be a skills tab there. And so from that skills tab, you're gonna be able to add in the new grade plan name. So whatever grade plan, you have for your assessment skills, you'll add it right into there. And then once you have those assessment skills tied to your course or courses, you wanna make sure that it's available on the report card template to display those grades as well. So right in academic still, you're gonna go over to grades and report card setup. Here, you're gonna edit your template, and then there is gonna be a design form tab. I believe it's the second one, and then you're gonna edit those courses in groups grid. So what you need to do in here is check off, the skills ratings checkbox. So there's gonna be a box that says you wanna show those skill ratings. After you've saved this, click on the grade column and make sure the correct assessment grading period is chosen. You wanna display attendance on report cards or make edits to the attendance that you currently have displaying. So another setting that's gonna be through your academics, grades, and the actual report card setup. You're gonna click on the three dots next to the appropriate report card and then click on edit template. Again, you're gonna go to that second tab, the design form, and you're gonna make sure that the attendance block is pulled onto the template. So that's the first thing you're gonna make sure that you either add or that's already there. It's gonna be a drag and drop over onto the template. And then you're gonna edit that block that you just added and make sure that you have your group types. So what types of groups are you adding attendance for? Are you doing this for academics? Do you take, attendance in your activities maybe or your advisories where you want those included as well? And then which categories do you want to include? So are we doing absences, only unexcused absences? Are we adding tardies onto there? So you wanna make sure that there's at least one group and one attendance type checked off, but you can check off as many groups and types as you want displayed on your report card. So parent access to report cards. So when you're ready for parents to actually come in and see the report cards or going in the other direction, if you wanna make sure they can't see them yet, you wanna set a future date for this, you're going to do this within the report card access. So that's gonna be with your academics, grades, and report card setup. You're gonna click that three dots to the, next to your report card, and then click edit current school year access. So that's gonna bring you specifically to this school year. You're gonna go in and put the appropriate date and time that you want them to be able to access grades, and you're gonna do this for each marking period. So you can set future dates and times so that they automatically become available when grading is done, and you can come in at any time and change, add, or remove access to report cards for any year and any grading period. For the academics perform academic performance block, if that is showing up as blank, what you're gonna wanna do is navigate to your academics into your grade calculations. And you're going to want to make sure that you've generated academic performance for the term. So this is going to be through grades in the grade calculations. You're going to go to generate the academic performance tab and then filter to the grade level and term that's not showing up correctly. Then if you click generate to the far right, this is going to generate whichever academic performance type and that's what's going to allow it to appear on your report cards in your academic performance block. So we do have some resources here that you can share with your teams to help with these areas. So we, of course, have our knowledge base. We have some specific links here that you can, bookmark. It's always a good idea. So we have our knowledge base articles. There is in product help, so you can always get in product help specifically in that report card builder as well. The webinar, so this recording will be emailed to you within the next twenty four hours. You can share this out with anybody on your team that might benefit from seeing this. And then we do have product update briefings coming November 17 through the twenty first. Great. Hey. Thanks, Sarah, for doing that. We'll also have a a q and a period. But first, I'm gonna launch the survey for this, short webinar, so we have a chance to get everyone's responses before they begin to drop off. So, Sarah, with some help from Aruna Atreya, who's our subject matter expert along with Sarah, will, cover your q and a. And, yeah, that's it. So it's my first time doing this, so I hope I'm doing this correctly. So I'm gonna click the button and launch it. Okay. Great. So if you could answer that before you leave, we'd love to hear your feedback, and I will go off stage and let Sarah and Aruna, take your questions. Okay. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, Melanie. Alright. So like Melanie mentioned, so we're gonna take some time to do Q and A. So definitely any questions that you have, we are gonna get to as many questions as we possibly can. Make sure that you're posting those in the q and a because we're not monitoring the chat. The chat's just kinda there for you guys. So any questions that you want answered, go ahead and pop those into the q and a. We'll be answering those through that section. And just a couple additional resources for you guys while we're working on answering your questions, so you can chat with support if there's anything that you need help with. And you can also email customersuccess@blackbaud.com to connect with, a customer success manager. So I am gonna pop off screen just so we can answer those questions, but we are still here, and we're gonna be keeping an eye on everything. So remember, just pop those questions into the q and a. Alright. Awesome. I'm back, everybody. We've got some really great questions coming into the chat, sorry, into the q and a. So I just wanted to pop in and read some of these out loud to make sure that everybody's, seeing these answers, getting the answers and everything. So one of the questions that we did have was demonstrating adding a new comment in the translation tab. Unfortunately, we're not set up today to do a live demonstration, but if there's anything specific that you wanna see, absolutely don't hesitate to reach out to support. They can show you how to do some of the things that we were talking about if you need some more detail, or step by step instructions. Next question, are there plans to update the report card access settings? So the date and time applies, and that's been answered. So we have made some changes recently to how access dates work with the grade plan. So definitely take a look in there. Anything that you're not seeing, if it's not exactly what you're looking for, don't hesitate to visit the ideas portal with that as well. Next question. Is it possible to record assessments and grades in the same report card? So, yes, this can be done in the new report card builder. All of your courses in the system, you can have up to one standard grade and one assessment grade plan tied to the course, and those can absolutely be both be pulled on to report cards. Generally, we refer to those as a hybrid report card. So if you hear that term, that's what we're referring to there. Next question. We are adding new courses. I was wondering if there is any way for the skills from the first quarter to automatically show up for each quarter, or do they need to be added again? So you will need to make sure you enable the ability to display the assessment skills, and they're gonna appear in the report card. So you just need to make sure that you're displaying those there. Let's see. Another question. We, will report card comments support bulleted list and other HTML formatting in the future? In the current filter, there is some built in formatting options, so definitely take a look at those, through I believe it's the design or style tab. So there's definitely some options in there. Another school just moved to the built in template builder from a custom. And then is the text builder going to get enhanced to include the option to build a table? That's not something that's planned at this time, and I would say definitely check the ideas portal, see if that's a request that's already in there. If it is, you know, absolutely subscribe to it, vote on it. If you don't see it, definitely don't hesitate to add it. Another question. We are using skill ratings in our elementary, and the legend is not appearing on our port card or on our report card. We are using the new report card builder. Definitely something you wanna reach out to support for so that they can take a look at your specific report card and your setup and help you get that display in correctly. Another question. Is there a time set for the sunset of the old report card builder? As of right now, there is no specific date. If they are going to sunset that and they have a date, that is something that everyone will be made aware of beforehand. Is there are there any plans to include teacher name as an element in the header section? So an adviser name can be added. Some workarounds that I've seen as well are to use a custom publishable field because those can also be pulled in. So you could do something like an import of teacher names, maybe if you're thinking homeroom teacher. Those can be populated through an import into the custom fields, and those can be pulled into those headers. Let's see. Another question. Currently, I am only able to enter the date parents get access. How did you get the time field? The time field is actually directly beneath that date field. So when you expand that section, the top, field is a date, and then right below that is the actual time. Alright. Let me see if we have any other Aruna's back there answering all the questions. So let me just see if there's anything that I've missed yet. Alright. Awesome. So, we're going to go through. We're going to answer some additional questions there. Oh, I see another one that came through. If teachers don't mark their grades as ready for review or reviewed, will they not display on the student's report card despite being entered on their end? So even if you have that review period set up, the review, the review being done is not required. So it won't impact whether or not the grade is displayed. It is a review and not an approval. So it's just an opportunity for your managers to review grades, review comments, But if it if they don't get to it or if teachers don't mark things ready as reviewed, it's not gonna prevent those grades or comments from showing on the report card. Another question looks like they came in. How can we enter grades and transcripts from previous years from our previous SIS? We are new to Blackbaud this year. So this is actually something that our professional services team would be able to assist you with an import that we have specifically for this purpose. If you wanted to do this manually, it would involve treating your previous year's information, so the classes and grades as transfer grades. Aruna did provide a knowledge base specifically for that question, but if you go to the knowledge base and search transfer grades, you'll find, the information for that one there as well. If engaging professional services is something that you're interested in doing, you can always reach out to your customer success manager or your school's account executive, and they can definitely talk to you more about those areas. Alright. I'm going to jump off again. Let's see if we can get some more of these questions answered, and we'll see well, try to get everything done, but, we'll we'll see if I can pop back on and answer any additional questions that come in. Hey, folks. Sarah and Aruna are busy working behind the scenes here, trying to respond to as many questions as possible. While we can't commit to answering every single question, we'll definitely get to as many as we can. And I see a few folks, okay, still putting questions in q and a. Just a reminder, that we want those driven to I'm sorry. Still putting questions in chat. We want those driven towards q and a. Let's see. And a reminder about the survey if you have not already completed. Looks like we got about five minutes left. I can see that this is a very popular topic. Lots of questions still. Coming up on three minutes remaining. I do believe we are going to call it once we reach time. But like I mentioned, the folks are still working behind the scenes here. Megan, Sarah, and Aruna are working, behind the scenes to respond to as many of the q and a questions as they are able to. If you have already submitted the survey, and you don't have any remaining questions, I don't see any issues, with you ending kind of the session on your end. We are just kind of holding space for the team behind the scenes to respond, to as many of the questions as we can. Jean, in terms of, in terms of being able to quickly respond to each of the questions without, kinda taking up space and talking, for folks that might not be concerned with the answers. I think that is kind of the reason that that mode of kind of typing from behind the scenes was selected. Alright, folks. Coming up on the one minute mark here. Another shameless plug for survey responses if you have not already provided. Alright. Great. I just wanted to pop back on and say thank you to everybody for attending. We really appreciate your time and your questions and your survey answers. Please don't hesitate to reach out to support or email the customersuccess@blackbaud.com if you have any questions. But thank you again, and I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their week.